Alex Dumitru / Sandossu

One of the biggest problems when working online is that there are a lot of distractions that will keep you away from working and decrease your productivity. One of my biggest problem is that I get distracted from something and sometimes I forget what I was doing, losing a lot of time.

To prevent this from happening anymore, I made an exact scheduled and imposed me some rules that I will try to follow and see how much this helped me. Here is what I though of:

1. Make a well defined daily schedule and try to respect it. Do exactly what you proposed to, in the exact order. Make sure to make the schedule as reliable as possible.

2. Laziness is keeping a lot of us away from working, but if you really want to achieve your goals, this has to go. Be sure to include enough rest in your schedule, so you won’t be tired and lazy, because this can be an important factor in decreasing productivity.

3. Use instant messaging and emails only when you really need to. I figured that this was keeping me away from working and that I was spending a lot of hours with no sense, chit-chatting. The best option is to keep them closed while working, but if you need to talk with someone, stay invisible for the others or set a ‘Busy’ status. If it happens and someone disturbs you, try to keep the conversation as short as possible and get back to work. Even if you are disturbed for a very short time, it can distract you and you might lose your ideas.

4. You probably won’t want to put your cellphone on ‘silent’ mode while working, because there might be someone that really needs to get to you, but like the instant messaging, don’t spend too much time chit-chatting and follow your schedule.

5. Try not to let anything on the other day and do everything as scheduled. If you start doing this, it’s a step back and you won’t reach your target on time.

6. Take short breaks. If you work for too long without a break, you get bored and tired, so take short brakes, but not while working on something. Finish what you currently have to do and relax doing something you like, then get back to work.

7. If you feel tired, take a short nap of a few hours, because it’s very important and could decrease productivity.

Blogging itself is a trend and if you do blog then you have already followed this one. But there a lot more appearing and you have to make use of everything to bring traffic and increase your readership.

Social media is so used those days, that you definitely have to use it to bring more traffic. Unfortunately, it won’t bring quality traffic, but you need all you can get and if you have good skills, then you can also monetize and convert it like organic traffic, just the rates will be lower.

Latest trend now is Twitter and like all social media websites, all you need is a powerful profile and you’ll get a good audience. It’s advantage is that it can bring visitors that are really interesting in your blog and this means a high rate of conversion. It’s not as powerful as the others, but worth.

To follow the trends you only need to do a bit of social media research and see what’s on the buzz at the moment, to make sure you don’t miss it and lose valuable visitors.

Also, you might want to follow me on Twitter to get my latest updates.

There are a lot of blogger good at marketing that only tell their readers what they want to read and make profit of their naivety. Unfortunately, this is far away from quality blogging, because almost all blogs of this kind that I’ve seen offer almost no useful information and only general facts that can be found everywhere.

Readers are subscribing when seeing that blogger earns a lot of money in the hope they will find out how to do it. But rarely this will happen because nobody is that fool to tell their secret and worse than that, a lot are lying just to get a strong readership and profit.

Those blogs mean time loss and a good blogger has to manage his time very good to increase productivity, so only subscribe and read the blogs that can really help you, don’t just get fooled by everyone.

Of course nobody will tell big secrets, but by reading a lot of useful information you can make an idea of what you have to do and test, until you get somewhere good.

What do you think of those bloggers ?

Once with Alexa’s new ranking system announcement, a lot of blogs have lost their rank. The reason is that Alexa is now based on more informations, not only the surfers that have Alexa toolbar installed. Now websites and blogs that had a tech savvy audience have lost rank, Alexa becoming more accurate and not advantaging them anymore.

A lot of popular websites and blogs have met a drastically decrease in rankings, like Problogger ( 3xxx -> 12xxx ), Digitalpoint ( 3xx -> 9xx ), Shoemoney ( 2xxx -> 19xxx ). I have also seen some not-so-major changes in my websites rankings, most of them going down a bit.

I see this changes as an improvement and hopefully Alexa will continue to become more and more accurate, because a lot of people and mostly advertisers are basing on this stats that, at least until now, weren’t relevant at all.

Find more rank changes on some blogs at Amit’s blog or you can read Alexa’s announcement.

For the last few days, StumbleUpon has continuously banned accounts and a lot are complaining that the traffic has went down. I have a lot of friends that were power users and got their accounts banned for different reasons or for no reason at all.

I have also noticed a decrease in traffic from StumbleUpon, but i can’t tell for sure if it’s because of the algorithm or because my websites have been down and flagged as unavailable, due to my servers issues. I will be able to tell more exactly in the future, when I’ll be sure I’ve got rid of that flag.

Lately, Stumble became the best social network, from my point of view, being easier to market than Digg and sometimes brining more traffic. Unfortunately, Stumble isn’t such a good link bait as Digg, but can still bring some quality, related links.

As you might already now, Digg has screwed it’s algorithm really badly from it’s last updates and has hired moderators that won’t let anything pass to the front page, if they don’t like it. That’s why a lot of users left and some of them joined and started using Stumble. Now, Stumble seems to have taken Diggs example, by screwing it’s algorithm.

There truly are a lot of accounts that ruin the system and have to be banned, but in my opinion, they have to focus on aggressively spamming profiles, haters, flamers and others that do a lot of bad and less on those that do promote their websites, along with many others.

With this I have to say Social Networking has reached a crisis point especially for Social Media Marketers, but for regular users too. Some new idea has to come out and I’m curious when this will happen. Considering this, it seems nothing can’t stay clean, but also this was already known. When something gets big, it has more and more issues, because everyone tries to profit.

I would like to read your opinion about this.

The time has come for this blog to get to another lever, along with a new layout. From now on i will post more often and will do my best to make quality posts, as i think now i am more experienced in blogging and the areas this blog is covering.

You should soon see the difference

WordPress has just released a new great version, with improved dashboard, uploader and it comes with gravatars, internal gallery and more.
You can watch the screencast for a better view of what i am talking about.
Get it now.

When you are choosing your way in life, on the financial side, you have to take a wise decision and think about the future. This is available for everything, the highschool, college, university, job or business. What do i mean by a dead end road is a point when you don’t have an expansion possibility and your monthly earnings cannot increase anymore or increase extremely slowly.

Take a look at some good decisions taken by well known business men, like Sergey Brin, Larry Page and others. If they were choosing to get a job they were probably working from 9 to 5 for a decent salary and had a monotonous life. But they risked and wanted more, so took the good decision.

Now i am talking from my own experience. Three years ago i started learning to code and design and worked as a freelancer, but i was working a lot and had no chance to increase my earnings, because the prices are quite fixed and i was paid on a hourly basis. I was probably able to increase my hourly earnings by learning more and improving my skills, but not much.

Then i said why should i build websites for others so i will get a small price while they will earn much more with them and not build them for myself. And so i started making a few websites and spending less time working as a freelancer. My earnings decreased a lot, but the potential was much higher, so i kept doing it until i stopped working as a freelancer at all.

I started to learn about SEM, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and along with building more websites and improving the current ones, I’ve done some consulting for other companies and earned much more than i did from freelancing. Now I’m very happy and i really think I’ve finally chosen the good road.

So the point is to think about the potential of what you are doing or planning to do, set some goals and start working. It won’t be very easy in the beginning, but done right, every business should expand.

Google has been changing rules lately and it’s banning lots of websites, especially for selling text links. Now, the only way to sell links is to use the “nofollow” tag if you want to remain G’s friend.

Of course not everyone is satisfied with Google’s measures and many continue to sell links, but the problem comes when Google excludes them from it’s index. If G isn’t an important source of traffic for you, then you shouldn’t have any reason to worry, except that once banned you lose the PR and probably no one will buy links anymore.

But what if Google is your main source of traffic and simply kicks your ass ? Then you definitely have a problem. I took KnowMoreMedia’s case, a blog network with a lot of paid bloggers and that had a decent traffic and revenue. Unfortunately for them, Google was bringing the most of the traffic, until they found out KMM is selling text links. Now their traffic has decreased significantly and they aren’t probably even earning enough to pay their bloggers.

In this case is both parties fault, because on one side Google shouldn’t impose this rule, but can do it. On the other side KMM was making profit of G’s traffic and should have followed the rules. Now probably they are going bankrupt because they weren’t responsible enough and didn’t took good actions.

It’s true sometimes we have to risk, but this definitely wasn’t the case, because they were doing much better if not selling the links and getting the traffic from Google, than selling links and getting no traffic or PR. Now they are earning neither from the CPM/CPC ads and aren’t going to sell links anymore, because of the PR0 Google left them with.

The conclusion is you have to take care what measures you take when running your business and never put all your eggs in one basket.

I just logged into Feedburner to check my Blog’s subscribers and i see that three of my blogs went to 0. It seems like Feedburner is having an issue again and unfortunately lately it has had issues quite often.

Hopefully they won’t just lose track of my subscribers and solve the problem, as i am losing both visitors and my subscribers might unsubscribe if they aren’t receiving news from my blogs.

Last month i’ve noticed something opposite from now, when my subscribers went up with more than 100% for one day and then just returned to normally. I’m sure that they subscribed all in one day and then unsubscribed the next one and that was another Feedburner issue.

Are you noticing anything strange today ?

Update: Everything is back to normal now